Review: Avengers: Endgame

They say all stories must come to an end.

Okay, nobody really says that, which is lucky because it's not even true. There are hundreds of characters whose stories still haven't come to an end (Doc Savage? The Shadow?) and plenty more that were given an ending that didn't stick (Sherlock Holmes? Batman?). The Marvel Universe characters are never really going to die, if for no other reason than Disney paid billions of dollars for them; good luck explaining to the shareholders why you just threw [spoiler redacted] into the bin.

Still, this is a pretty spectacular bin toss. Running over a doesn't-feel-like-it three hours (being split into three fairly distinct stages helps), this brings in pretty much everyone from the past and present Marvel Universe - except for Paul Bettany's Vision, who died in the previous film and is clearly this movie's Hawkeye as he doesn't even rate a single mention - for a greatest hits collection that manages to emotionally pay off the cliffhanger from the previous Avengers film, throw in some fun time travel hijinx, and wrap it all up with an all-star massive battle that... okay, it's big rather than brilliant, but sometimes big does the job.

(Marvel's inability to nail down their characters powers relative to each other is a weakness here - since when is Captain Marvel more powerful than Thor? Can't Doctor Strange change reality? How does Hawkeye even stay alive once the laser beams start flying?)

Oddly, some of the shakier moments are the character-based ones. Remember how Captain America and Iron Man don't like each other? Despite being the least fun dynamic in the entire Marvel universe, it's back; likewise, Thor's emotional arc works largely to support a handful of sight gags that stop being funny roughly ninety minutes before the movie ends. One big scene relies on a bond between two characters that hasn't even been a thing since the first Avengers movie; whatever's going on with the Hulk seems based more on having him just be all-CGI all the time now.

The tension that really drives Avengers: Endgame isn't whether Thanos will be defeated or how, but how they're going to provide an ending for a story that has no end. Fortunately the comics books got there first, and so this resolves that problem the same way the comic books do - some of the actors move on but the brand names remains. It's the end of an era, but not in the way the film sells itself as. This is probably the last time a Disney movie - which at the moment is around 30% of all movies that make it to cinemas in terms of market share, so we might as well just call it "movies" - will acknowledge that actors have a role in shaping the characters that make Disney so much money.

It's no secret that Avengers: Endgame is in large part motivated by Disney's need to clear the decks as the Marvel Universe's core group of actors run out their contracts. It's not that keeping [spoiler redacted] around couldn't happen for story reasons; nothing here feels that inevitable, and every single character here has enough comic book adventures to fuel a dozen solo spin offs at least. But keeping them around would cost serious money even if the actors did want to stick around, so out the door they go. And you'd better believe that at some point in the very near future anyone signing up to wear a Marvel hero outfit is going to be signing over likeness rights in such a way that CGI versions of them can keep turning up if need be.

[spoiler]

(is it any real surprise that the only Avenger who ends the movie in a position to continue to appear in generic future Marvel movies is The Hulk, who has been transformed into a fulltime CGI character?)

[end spoiler]

Avengers: Endgame is built around the idea that our fondness for these characters is so strong we'll overlook or forget all the behind-the-scenes stuff. But the reason why we like these characters is based largely on the performance of the actors: Robert Downey Jr always played Tony Stark as Robert Downey Jr, but Disney didn't spend all that money on Robert Downey Jr. They spent it on Iron Man, and at the end of the day - or until CGI gets good enough to create believable human characters out of thin air (Disney is a company founded on animation, after all) - Iron Man is where their investment lies.

So Avengers: Endgame still has emotional moments that hit home even though it's a massive exercise in box ticking and character juggling with frankly average action sequences and wild tonal shifts because it's the kind of victory lap we're almost certainly never going to see again. It's a farewell to the actors rather than the characters; their characters get endings that look backwards rather than forwards, and work as a capstone to their adventures rather than - as will increasingly become the norm as it has become in the comics - launching pads for the new versions.

Plus time travel is now totally a thing in the Marvel universe, with at least two characters from the past now running around in the present. Once Disney gets the CGI up to speed, there's nothing stopping whoever makes up the new roster of The Avengers (or The Defenders, or The Ultimates, or Nextwave, or any other Marvel hero team) from deciding the only way to defeat their latest bad guy is by going back in time and grabbing [redacted] in their prime played by CGI [redacted] to help them out. Once you put on a superhero outfit, nobody ever really dies.

- Anthony Morris


PS: the next epic superhero movie that says "fuck it" and decides to hold its sense-shattering climactic battle in a populated area - or ever somewhere with some visual variety - rather than the boring empty field that has become the norm ever since everyone complained about the body count in Man of Steel is really going to knock people's socks off.

Review: The Curse of the Weeping Woman

It really doesn’t take much to get a spin-off from the Conjuring franchise. First Annabelle the evil doll got her own series (with a third movie due later this year), then that creepy nun from a painting had an origin story (that was actually kind of wacky), and now the Weeping Woman gets her time to shine in a solo outing. You remember her, she was... in one of the earlier films... being scary?

(it turns out the link isn't a previous appearance from her, but from Father Perez (Tony Amendola), who was in the first solo Annabelle movie)

Where The Nun borrowed heavily from Italian horror films and gothic thrillers, The Curse of the Weeping Woman returns to more familiar ground with a fairly standard haunting set in the 70s (which was we all know, was the scariest decade ever). Linda Cardellini is Anna Garcia, a single mum working as a social worker who steps in when she finds one of her clients has her children locked in a cupboard. Turns out that was to protect them from evil spirit La Llorona, who promptly drowns the kids then turns her evil gaze on Anna’s offspring. 

While there are a few brief scenes that suggest the social work angle is going to play a bigger part in what happens - the set-up that Anna will have her kids taken from her just like she took away her client's children is actually a pretty decent one - the film rapidly falls back into the usual exorcism rut. 

Whichever film came up with the idea that a ghost would attach itself to a person rather than a place (I'm going to say it was the first Paranormal Activity movie but I'm almost certainly wrong) deserves a thanks here yet again; remember the days when you'd spend half a haunted house movie thinking "just drive away you idiots"?

There’s really nothing surprising or original going on here and the film barely manages to get over the 90 minute mark (which, when you're just doing a basic exorcism movie, is for the best), But it does manage to deliver a few decent jump scares and a handful of creepy images, which is about all you can really expect. 

Cardellini’s solid performance as a mother so loving she still cares even when her dingbat kids mess up a banishing ritual just to grab a doll provides at least some reason to care about the usual slamming doors and spooky corridors. But as curses go, this is barely a "damn" at best.

- Anthony Morris

Out now: Aquaman

 

In his first appearance in 2017's Justice League, Jason Momoa’s Aquaman made his mark by being the bro-est superhero around. Now he has his own movie (out now on DVD and blu-ray), and director James Wan actually dials down his bro-ness – which is pretty much the only thing dialled down here, because this is a film that’s going extremely hard in pretty much every direction. While not all of it works, its failures end up being part of its charm: whatever you think of its extremely loud and fairly dumb approach, it knows the only way to make it work is to commit 100%.

There’s a real balancing act going on here: even for a superhero, underwater fish lord Aquaman is hard to take seriously, and yet treating him as a joke would be fatal. So this sets out to make him the most normal thing in the film, plonking the hard-drinking part-time superdude into a meandering story that takes in a sad lighthouse dad, seven distinct (and usually bonkers) undersea kingdoms, a royal feud, the title “Ocean Master”, a modern-day pirate bad guy, Nicole Kidman as a trident-wielding mum, killer fish, a desert quest, killer fish men, beach training sequences, dinosaurs just in the background because why not, trash tidal waves, and a racist sea monster – and that’s barely scratching the surface. 
 

The not-so-secret to Aquaman's success is that while the story is actually kind of flaccid - it's basically a slow race between two Aqua-kings to see who can bring off their scheme first - it's constantly throwing new things at the screen. Over the course of the film Aquaman (AKA Arthur Curry) travels via ute, a regular submarine, an Atlantean submarine, a plane, by foot across the desert, a fishing boat and sea monster - plus he swims around using both regular and super-styles. He fights at least four different kinds of bad guy / creature, has multiple training montages, goes from punching dudes in the head to disrupting an epic fantasy battle, and occasionally drops a servicable one-liner. He's a very busy man.

With all that going on, it's no surprise that this is an uneven film at the best of times. The visuals are often stunning, but the dialogue is serviceable at best (there's a big speech about the difference between a king and a hero that had someone near me groaning), while the fight scenes are always competent but rarely memorable. But what this does get right is the world-building. To date DC's superhero movies have largely taken place in the real world, but this covers everything from futuristic underwater super-cities to "lost world" islands to desert ruins to teeming sub-surface nightmares in a way that still sells them as a (somewhat) cohesive whole.

It's all a bit exhausting, and Momoa's slightly subdued performance occasionally feels like a reflection of how the audience most likely feels at this onslaught of new sensation. But again, the slightly cheesy tone works in the film's favour: it may take it all seriously, but there's enough oddball moments scattered throughout that the tone is never grimly relentless in the way that something like Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice was. 

There's a moment where Aquaman wakes up on a fishing boat while noodlely nautical flute music plays on the sountrack, then he goes out on deck and sees his underwater tour guide Mera (Amber Heard) is actually playing the music on a flute she found; you can't hate a film that finds time for that.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Hellboy

Supposedly the reason that we even have a third Hellboy movie is that everyone in Hollywood who isn't Disney or Warner Brothers really really wants to get into the comic book universe business and Hellboy is one of the few reasonably well-developed, big name comic book titles that hasn't already been snapped up. There's no actual artistic reason for this movie to exist, no story behind it anyone was clamoring to tell. Boy, does it show.

That said, this version does at least make a few small gestures towards coming up with a slightly different vision of the character than the one seen in the two earlier, better films by Guillermo del Toro: this Hellboy (David Harbour) works solo for much of the film, feels a little more sullen (possibly explained by the character still being in his teens or early twenties emotionally; demons age a lot slower) and has more of a heavy metal vibe. None of which make him more of a fun character to watch, strangely enough; he's firing out what should be decent one-liners but pretty much none of them land.

The story involves bad guys putting together the pieces of the Blood Queen (Milla Jovovich), who was chopped up by King Arthur in an amusingly over-the-top opening scene. But it also involves Hellboy being in a funk, being attacked by people who think he's set to bring about the end of the world, being set up by an old enemy, making new friends, fighting a bunch of side monsters who just happen to be passing by, and after a while none of it really seems to matter.

Director Neil Marshall, working from an overstuffed script by Andrew Cosby, throws just about everything at the wall here, mostly body parts - this is definitely going for a hard-R when it comes to gore, but the underfunded CGI renders pretty much all of it ineffective. The script feels like there's at least three separate stories going on, which is probably the point as pulp excess is part of Hellboy's charm. But Marshall never manages to get to tone right, with what should be big moments slipping away and important plot points undersold.

Then again, it could just be that the shoot was a tough one. Some characters simply vanish from the story, while close-eyed viewers might notice that Ian McShane's Trevor Bruttenholm (AKA Hellboy's dad) has an outfit change in the middle of a scene. The joins are mostly smoothed over, mostly because the film pinballs from one scenario to another at such at rate that next to none of it sticks. There's at least three bad guys, two of which are using the others while the character sold as the main bad guy is really a puppet plus everyone else thinks the real threat is Hellboy anyway. Whatever happened to just punching out a bunch of monsters?

There's a bunch of that too, but while the monster designs are good the fights are just more weightless CGI. There's a sense here that if one element had worked the rest would have clicked into place, but everything is just that little bit sub-par and the whole thing ends up just staggering around.  To be fair, the del Toro films had their problems too; despite the seemingly movie-friendly premise, the Hellboy comics are actually pretty weird when you look at them, with creator Mike Mignola's soaked-in-black-ink artwork serving up haunting images the movies could never replicate. Maybe the character just doesn't work outside of them.

This is the kind of weird mess that often ends up being acclaimed as an overlooked gem a decade later. Those future nerds are wrong. When your film's one decent laugh comes in a post-credit scene - you really can't go wrong with Thomas Haden Church - you're definitely not working as a comedy; unless you really like computer-generated splattered heads, this barely gets over the line as anything else .

- Anthony Morris

Review: Shazam!

Remember when superheroes were for kids? Eh, probably not: Tim Burton's Batman back in 1989 pretty much sunk that boat, and since then taking things way too seriously has been the hallmark of the grown-up superhero movie. How weird is it that we're getting a Joker movie that nobody under the age of 25 should see? Creepy murder clowns: they're not just for kids anymore.

All of which is kind of strange, because the one thing superheroes really can do better than just about any other genre is speak to the youth. The phrase "adolescent power fantasies" used to be thrown around a lot in comic-book circles when comics were trying to get out from under the influence of superheroes; the difficult thing today is explaining exactly why it was seen as a bad thing when it leads to a movie like Shazam!.

When orphan 13 year-old Billy Batson (Asher Angel) is given super-powers by a wizard (Djimon Hounsou) to defeat the running amok Seven Deadly Sins and their human puppet Dr Sivana (Mark Strong), he does what any teen would do: uses his all-grown-up superhuman form (Zachary Levi) to buy beer, get out of school, and become a YouTube sensation by doing nutty stunts. 

This is the DC universe in kid-friendly mode, ramping up the silliness and keeping the tone light without depriving audiences of superhero thrills. To be fair, the hero formerly known as Captain Marvel is definitely one of their sillier characters, and with a Mr Mind cameo - look him up - this is definitely steering into that side of the superhero world.

There's a lot of comedy here, but beyond that this as much about family and friendship – Billy’s growing bond with fellow group home resident Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer) is the surprisingly tender heart of this film – as it is about running around punching bad guys. Levi gives a note-perfect performance as a kid gleefully enjoying his superhero powers the most when he’s using them to do the least, while Grazer rapidly becomes a perfect sidekick and Strong... well, he does what he can with an underdrawn character. 

Some of the jokes aren’t the freshest, but even the old “let’s test your powers” routines are fun to watch and when things start to get heartfelt this still had a bunch of strange but fitting cards to play. This really does get just about everything right, and the result is easily the strongest DC universe film since Wonder Woman. Shazam! is all-ages fun that’s all-ages funny; with darker superhero films looming on the horizon, it’s the comic relief you didn’t know you needed.

- Anthony Morris

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